OK, I've had the MIDI Captain for a couple of days now, and overall I am very happy. 10 switches, two expr. pedal inputs, excellent programmability, low-latency Bluetooth MIDI output, battery power. All this for $180. And
PSA: Amazon is now bundling this and the MIDI Mate Bluetooth receiver dongle (normally another $35) for $185. They're also offering a $20 off coupon on the MIDI Captain alone, so you can get it today for $160. (Naturally this made me crazy, and Amazon wouldn't adjust, so I've already arranged to return everything, and re-ordered at the lower price.
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Switches are a little scratchy, but relatively quiet. No click at all. I've turned into something of a footswitch connoisseur LOL. So far my personal favorites are the switches on the Helix. Smooth and quiet with a consistent little click for just enough haptic feedback. Second place goes to the Hotone Ampero Control 4, whose switches are completely silent, and really smooth. The MIDI Captain isn't as high quality as either, but the switches are consistently responsive, and they don't make enough noise to carry into a mic while you're tracking or looping or whatever.
The approach to editing is really (IMO refreshingly) old school. You plug the device into a PC with a USB cable and its contents pop up like a thumbdrive. Every preset has a global.txt file and a subfolder with text files for each of its switches. Edit the files, restart the pedal and your done. For a second I thought it was a little nuts having to edit a different file for each switch, until I wanted to put together a preset with 4 switches from one preset and 6 switches from another... and I realized all I had to do was copy 4 files from one folder to the other. This is REALLY straightforward. If you've ever tried to manage MP3s or photos on an iPhone and gotten twitchy because Apple made it so complicated, you'll love this by contrast.
All the devils in the details relate to expression pedals. I was really hoping the compatible MIDI Mate wireless receiver supported Group mode (for multiple controllers) like CME WIDI does, but no such luck. (To be fair, no one claimed this mode was supported, nor do any other receivers that I'm aware of, apart from CME.) So my options are to use MIDI Mate, which is USB rechargeable with an on/off switch I'll surely forget to turn off, and connect a conventional expression pedal to the MIDI Captain via TRS cable*; or go back to CME WIDI with a fragile transmitter hanging off the back of MIDI Captain - but this would allow me to continue using my BOSS EV-1-WL. Neither option is great, but I think there are enough strikes against MIDI Mate that I'll send it back and go with CME.
(*While I was testing wired expression pedals, I had all kinds of unexpected results. Seems expression pedal inputs employ all kinds of tricks I wasn't aware of, and they're anything but consistent between different devices. For instance, plugging my Ampero Press into the MIDI Captain resulted in a really messed up sweep. Apparently it has an unusual potentiometer value, and some reviewers have complained about this. I never noticed, because my QC somehow responds this pedal just when it's plugged in directly. Maybe it's checking the impedance dynamically? I have no idea.)
provided it's obvious what the syntax is